Pumpkin Pie by Jean Ure Read Free Book Online

you recognise Brad Pitt?” And he would take her hand and say, “Hi there, Saffy!” and she would just nearly die.

    Oh, it was such a beautiful dream! Far more exciting than any of my others. I simply couldn’t
imagine
what had ever made me think I would like to be a car mechanic! It is without doubt an extremely useful occupation but I don’t think anyone could call it glamorous and I have never heard of any Best Car Mechanic Awards, though of course there may be, there may even be Oscars, only it is not done on television and you would probably not get many of the mechanics wearing slinky black dresses and showing their legs. But it is a nice thought!
    Not many of the boys at the Academy looked like they would ever become car mechanics. I don’t think I am being unfair to car mechanics when I say that on the whole you don’t expect them to be especially sensitive and creative sort of people. Then again, of course, I could be wrong. Just because a person likes to lie upside down beneath cars and stick his head into their engines, and get covered all over in oily black gunge, doesn’t necessarily mean they are not sensitive. Or creative. I am sure you can be very creative inside a car engine. It is just a different sort of creative. That is all.
    One thing Saffy was right about, we didn’t have any boys like Nathan Corrie. Thank goodness! They weren’t all gorgeous, but at least they all came from this planet. One or two of them were actually quite geeky, not to mention goofy, and even what I would call plain. But they weren’t boring! What I mean is, they had
personality.
Plus they could talk about stuff other than football or computers. You could have real proper conversations with them, like discussing what you had just done in class or a new scene you’d worked out for
Sob Story.
I really enjoyed doing that! I’d never thought of boys as being people you had conversations with.
    Some of them were quite funny. The boys, I mean. There was this one boy, Robert Phillips, who couldn’t pronounce his Rs and had to keep reciting
Round the ragged rocks the ragged rascal ran.
It always came out as “Wound the wagged wocks,” which drove Mrs Ambrose to despair. On the other hand, she said there was quite a demand, these days, for “upper class English twits” in Hollywood movies, so maybe he could turn his speech impediment to good use.
    I personally found it quite difficult to picture Robert as a movie star, but Saffy, in her wise way, said that stranger things had happened. I was just glad that I didn’t have any kind of speech impediment. Mrs Ambrose said the only sound I had to work on was the “oo” sound and she told me to practise “the moon in June” and
mmmmmOO.
I made sure only to do it when Pip was downstairs and safely out of earshot!

    Another boy who was a bit geeky was Ben Azariah. He had a head like a turnip! His hair grew
upwards,
to a point. He did this thing of twizzling it with his finger which made us all laugh! In spite of being geeky, he was totally brilliant as a mimic. He could take off Ant and Dec really well. He could also do this famous footballer that I won’t name in case it might count as libel, plus loads others, who I also won’t name, because I mean you just never know. Celebs can be really touchy. Mum says they will sue you at the drop of a hat. I wouldn’t want that!
    Another person Ben could do was Mrs Ambrose. He had us all in stitches being her.
    “Robert, my
deah
boy! You really must learn to pronounce your Rs!”
    I certainly couldn’t imagine Ben being a big Hollywood star, but I could easily see him having his own TV show. Saffy agreed. She added that when people were a bit odd-looking, they often turned to humour. She said, “It’s a defence mechanism.”
    I found this rather worrying and immediately rushed home to examine myself in the mirror and see if I was funny-looking, and if that was why I had chosen to play an old person in
Sob Story,
so that I could